"This world sucks."

There is theft, dishonesty and depression in this world. It is laced with deception, murder, rape and perversion. Babies are killed every day through the heartless acts of abortion and middle-aged men are stealing from senior citizens. Another teacher is sent to prison for having sexual relations with her 13-year old student. Brothers and sisters having babies.

Okay, we get it. It's a pretty scary world we live in.

But get this. I'm about to let you in on a little secret that very few people these days are fully aware of. Now don't go spreading this around too much because it will completely throw off the balance of this world and every little drama queen and king will not have anything to talk about.

There is still good in this world.

That's it. That's my point. But, alas, I find these days it's very hard to find people interested in the good things happening in this world. Of course, a statement like this will get the naysayers going on about how "you can't hide the bad things in life. That won't make it go away." That's a good point. Glad to hear that because if that were the case, all the good things in the world would no longer exist because everyone seems to be hiding that. Maybe that's why negative people tend to forget to talk about the good things. Maybe it's because they have neglected the good things for so long that they have forgotten that every day someone is caring for a helpless friend; a father is helping her daughter to believe she is beautiful; a child is protecting a smaller child from a bully; a grandmother is taking in a stray puppy who has been hanging around her house for the last week. If that is the case, what is there to do about it?

Well, for starters, for those of you who insist in looking towards the bad things in life, forcing it on others, well, I get the point. I know there is bad in this world and no amount of your neverending bombartment of depressing stories, tragic anecdotes and woeful banter will cause me to buckle to the school of "man, this worlds sucks." We know. We know. Now get over it. For pete's sake, if this world is in such shoddy condition, is it not even more astounding, amazing, just plain awesome that something good is happening in this world? Heck, we should all be going on and on about that act of goodness because it's apparently so rare because people very rarely talk about it.

But I don't blame the whole lot of them, those naysayers. I blame the media. That oh-so-reliable news media that I can trust to bring me the real-life happenings of every day without the slightest hint of sensationaliasm or liberal biases. I blame them for making a story about a tragic outcome something bigger than it really is. I blame them for telling the same negative story after negative story at 6 o'clock and then again at ten. Only to be supported by print and radio. That's all that is happening in this world. Bad, bad, bad, bad things. Nothing good ever happens here. Nah, we've got nothing. The funny thing is, if you start paying attention to those very informative news stories and start grouping them into categories, you'll find that the categories are very few and taking out the different names and locations, you start thinking, "Hey, wait. Didn't I just hear this story last week?" That's because that's what they do. They take the same tragic story that garnered so many reactions and seek out a similar story because they know that we peons will forget we just heard that story a week ago and will be overly shocked again the very next week and we will go and tell everyone about it again. And again.

And now, amidst all this election brouhaha, well, it just seems to become more concentrated as far as the subject matter goes. Just once I would like to walk into a break room and hear someone say to someone else, "Your candidiate did some not so nice things but my candidate also did some not so nice things. Never mind that. Let's talk about something positive." Are we all truly shocked that the candidates have made mistakes in their pasts? Yes, I know it's important that we understand the background of our soon-to-be leaders but really, is digging up old dirt really that beneficial? Are we at all that surprised when we hear that one of the candidates (heck, always BOTH candidates) have done something not so stellar? And then we attribute it to who that candidate is today. But that only applies for the candidate that we do not support. When it is that person, we are realy quick to accept the tarnishment and all jump aboard to cry, "wolf!" but when it is one of our own, the very one that we have talked up so much in the past months, we have to do some research. We have to dig deep to make sure that this information is definitely not true. And we are even willing to accept the most minute, shoddy excuse we can find to say, well, that was then and I am sure (s)he's sorry now and there was a misundertanding and that was someone else. Look, just like my statement about all the other bad things that people tend to get obsessed with squawking about, it happens. Get over it.

But the big question now is if our candidates are inevitably going to have done bad things in the past (and may even be doing them now) and the world is filled with the bad things happening everyday, what are we supposed to do about? Is there any hope?

Well, there is. And the hope is in each one of us doing whatever the heck we can to counteract it. Where something bad is happening in this world, you can cancel it out by doing something good. Heck, do two good things and that will get you one step ahead of the bad thing. Yes, yes, I know this sounds like ridiculous fodder and is oversimplified to the point that it seems like a joke, but I mean it. We all have accepted the idea that negative stuff is going on but does it do anyone any good to be a supporter of it. Yes, I said supporter. When you go around and spread the word about how bad this world is, you are not doing anything to help rid the world of the bad. You are merely reinforcing the fact that this world sucks. You think you are making people aware and that it will help fight it but you will find that a lot of us are scared little children and when we get our heads filled with all this negatively, we begin to lose hope and only want to crawl into a hole and hopes it all ends quickly and when the world explodes, it won't hurt so bad. You see, you're only feeding the beast when you go around spreading the plague further. Negative attitudes breed more negative attitudes and can be like a flaming line of dominoes all falling over and withering away and dying instead of doing what they can to stop it.

So, again I say, be positive. Embrace being positive. I'm not saying you have to pretend this is a perfect world, because it is not. But you can acknowledge it as such and pray it gets better and then stop the spreading of the germ that can eat us all up from the inside if we let it. Does that make sense?

Okay, I'm going to stop being negative now.

Trusting oneself vs. Trusting God (a short observation)

We are flawed human beings.

We are fallen creations of God.

This being said, we cannot trust our own instincts because we are selfish creatures who can and will manipulate the natural instincts that God provided us, hence making the instincts tainted and no longer something we can trust.

We can only trust God.

Brutal Honesty (hold the Brutal, please)

“Brutal honesty,” he called it. “A person can learn so much more about himself through brutal honesty. None of this pussyfooting around with how-do-you-do’s and if-you-don’t-minds. F@ck that sh*t.” My brother had always been a bit on the coarse side. Having spent the last twelve years of his life in the army, his coarseness has only become more – how shall we say – brutal. This was his third tour in Iraq and having him back home – even only for a few short weeks to meet his newborn son for the first time – was refreshing, if not jarring. From the not-so-subtle reminder of how abrupt and straight to the point he could be, with each conversation we had – whether it be about politics, social issues, or how we disagreed on whether or not Quentin Tarantino movies would leave a mark in the history of filmmaking – I was reminded of my decision I had made in 1997 to do everything I could possibly do to not contribute to the continual onslaught of negativity that was being force fed to the world on a daily basis, through all channels of life.

Growing up Asian American in Northwest Arkansas gave me many reasons to be angry – many reasons to feel hate and to carry the biggest chip on my shoulder that my skinny little 11 year old frame could support. When you are a Vietnamese/Korean boy in a school where the ratio of Caucasians students to ethnic students was 100 to 1, and the ratio of those students who made slant-eyed faces and “ching chong” noises to you every day was 10 to 1, you learned to harbor some hateful thoughts and think the most destructive ideas your unlimited childhood imagination could conjure up, most of which involving laser neutralizers and/or chainsaws, and three quarters of the students on the playground. I even remember many of their names: Grant, Tommy, David, Eddie, Sally, Danny, Todd, Tim, Denise, Jason, Lissa, Carol, Tammy, Dawn, Geneva, Missy, Denver, Stephen, and I could go on and on. Best I don’t. It’s bad enough that these names have stuck in my mind after all these years. No need to bring back the negative thoughts and painful memories that were once suppressed but more importantly, were finally released from the deep recesses of my childhood mind when I came to the realization during that trip back to Saigon in 1997 that negativity – hate, guilt, anger, self-pity, revenge – would only plague my heart and could only lead to defeat in the grand scheme of life.

Even though I cringed every time Grant called me “gooky boy” and blushed each time Denise would tell me that the cutest girl in school liked me because “she likes Chinese food”, the childhood tauntings weren’t as bad as the insults and sneers that I got from adults. Looking back, I, to this day, cannot imagine how a grown man – let’s say in his mid to late 30’s – could be driving down the road in his blue and primer grey colored pickup truck, with his two buddies, and see a 11 year old Asian boy on his red Raleigh Racer dirt bike riding down the side of the road, and decide to honk his very loud, obnoxious horn at the young boy – shaking up the boy causing him to nearly fall off the bike and into traffic – then speeding by (while the boy’s ankles fumbled to regain footing on the pedals as he cried that no one would kill him) and laughing and calling to the child, “Go back where you came from, you yellow-skinned chink!” One of many incidences in my life that added insult to injury to my already hate-stained mistrust for adults and Americans in general. One of many moments that told me that in order to make it in this world, I would have to toughin’ up and attack first before anyone else attacked me.

In my teens, I became more sure of myself (at least, at the time, I thought I was). My yellow skin stayed yellow but became thick, my attitude even thicker. The insults didn’t stop coming. The only difference was that I now could throw them back at the assailants, only more quickly and even more brutally. With every “What kind of a dog did you have for dinner last night, Chihuahua or Poodle?” I would immediately quip back with, “I'm sorry, I missed dinner. I was too busy paying your mom for the h@ndj@b she gave me last night.” Most of the time, this would be enough to get them off my back. Other times, I ended up on my back instead, bruised and hurting but feeling proud inside that I did not back down. Eventually my reputation for holding my own granted me amnesty and I was no longer the target of ridicule and actually became accepted in many circles. The only thing was that in doing so, in order to obtain this acceptance and place of honor with all sects of high school social ladders, I lost my heart and tainted my soul. I had become cynical and hateful and this plagued my behavior all through my college years. I found that as I got older and as more ethnic groups began migrating to Northwest Arkansas, the racism faded away and that chip on my shoulder eventually fell off, but it was replaced by the naïve idea that I was untouchable and that I could do no wrong.

As I got bored with college and even more bored with myself, I branched out for other ways to express my cynical feelings and to make it more known how much contempt I had for the world. I found my release in a band called the Soda Pop Gods. Made up entirely of old schoolmates, all of which who shared the same ideas about life that I had developed and had gone from loser high school slackers to A-list cool guys due to the explosion of grunge and the acceptance of that who-gives-a-flying-flip lifestyle that we all lived, SPG became the biggest local band to hit Fayetteville since, well, whoever held that spot before we did. Our rock-stardom made us huge, ours egos a hundred times that. With such a captive audience for me to take advantage of, I wrote songs that pushed how terrible life was and how if you weren’t working your ass off to do your part in society, you were better off dead. And eventually the songs no longer tried to rally the troops for our cause but focused more on how if you weren’t a Soda Pop God, you weren’t spit. I was getting out of hand and it took a three-day tour with fellow ska/punkers Gals Panic for me to realize that I was way out of my league and it was about time someone slapped me across my headstrong yellow cheeks and wake me the hell up.

On the tour, internal fighting spawned by inflated egos began to tear the band apart. The biggest egos in the band, Billy the drummer and yours truly, spewed venom at each other between gigs and with neither of us willing to back down, eventually, after the end of the tour, I called it quits, with only guitarist Bob on my side, the Soda Pop Gods were no more and I was left questioning what the hell I had been preaching all this time.

It was between the years of 1995 to 1997 that two events changed my life: I was asked to front the band Kung-Fu Grip and my mother asked me to take a trip back to Saigon, Vietnam with her. The first of which, the easier of the two, put the wheels into motion. The latter sealed the deal.

My experience with the Soda Pop Gods left a bad taste in my mouth and since I was about to be singing again with that very same orifice, I decided it was time to take a dose of two bars of soap orally and clean up my act. The guys of Kung-Fu Grip agreed to my terms of writing only positive, fun songs and I agreed to my own goal to only stay in the band as long as it remained positive and fun-driven. This I did and during the five years with KFG, we were able to surpass the popularity of the Soda Pop Gods with the idea that life was too hard to be wasting worrying about tomorrow and more importantly, that life was already too angry as it was so why add to the hate when you can actually fight back with positivity and eventually overcome all the hate. A good start indeed but my newfound philosophy in life was incomplete and it wasn’t until I set foot on the other side of the planet that I realized what that missing piece was.

1997, Saigon. I had hesitated returning to my birth place for many years out of a disillusioned idea that in order to make it in America, I would have to become more Americanized. And in order to do that, I had no need for my family’s heritage and no use for reconnecting with the land that I had left as an infant some 23 years prior. Of course, time has told and that telling was the clincher that tore through my cocoon and let my new improved self free.

I had felt like life had dealt me a bad hand (a three, a seven, two jokers and the rules of play card) up to that point and that if I hadn’t been so stubborn, I would only have lived in misery. But all the things in my life that had contributed to the misery – the racial tauntings, the bad relationships with former friends and girlfriends, the boring life I had in Northwest Arkansas – suddenly became ludicrous and meaningless when I saw how the citizens of Saigon, Vietnam lived their daily lives. Although there were improvements to the country since the end of the Vietnam War in 1975 (the year my mother, older brother and I fled the country), they were still not well-off. The Vietnamese people still struggled for food and shelter and worked hard, long hours doing very manual labor earning in one week about a tenth of what the average American earned on an hourly basis. The streets were dirty, the people were poor. Sanitation was horrific, medical was a joke. Politics confused. Police corrupt. All this on a daily basis and most of the citizens that touched my life there still had enough dignity to greet me with a broad smile and a genuinely heartfelt, “We love America”. Those three words reminded me that I, too, loved living in America but was not feeling so good about myself. I had bitched and moaned in my early teens about the cheap shoes that my mother had bought for me every other year for school or hid my face in shame as my father drove up in our old beat up van each day to pick us up at the high school. And even into my college years, I complained about having to work 32 hours a week to pay for college and that many other students’ parents paid for everything for them and why I couldn’t have that luxury. Each incident that flashed through my head as I took that last step back onto the plane my final day in Vietnam that year stuck deep into my heart and it was then that I decided to see that every one of those spikes were removed from my soul before I stepped foot back onto American soil.

It hasn’t been easy – still isn’t – but now each morning when I have to stare back into those deep brown eyes that anchor my round face, as I wash off the night’s dreams and clear the sand out of my eyelids, I can see clearly into my own soul and know my place in this world. As I put on my pants and put one leg in at a time (just like everyone else), I remember that God has been telling me something every day of my life, something about who I am and who I am meant to be, and although it has taken me many years to understand that message, I now know that the negativity will always remain here on this Earth but that is no reason why I have to be a contributor to it. And although one person cannot take away all the hurt and pain, even the most minute effect a single kind gesture or polite nod can produce is more than anyone can ask for and means a whole lot more to someone out there, and if I can be the one to offer that, I gladly accept the challenge. Brutal honesty can indeed teach us all a lot about ourselves but just imagine how much nicer it would be if that learning process could do without the brutal and simply be more honest.

Epilogue: I think we all pretty much go through some kind of spiritual journey each day of our lives. Whether it be religious or merely just rediscovering ourselves (for the fourteenth time that day) the things you go through, the thoughts you think of, the very actions you choose to make (or accidentally make) – are part of this spiritual building. As a Christian, I can only hope and pray that what drives a person to bettering himself by bettering others’ lives is Christ in them, but if one without Christ can begin their palate by wanting to bring happiness in this world then that is a great start. Whether or not anyone else reading my essay changed their views on Christianity after reading this is not the point (although I try to lead by example so if this did make a difference in the right direction, I would be ecstatic). If at least one person walked away from this feeling better – feeling more positive about life – then my work here is done. But it’s not over yet. I can’t ever say, “I made one person happy, I can now rest.” This essay has been very beneficial in helping me remember my path here and adds yet another building block to my goal.

Faith

Let’s talk about Faith. This is a subject matter that I have had to deal with a lot lately and not only in my own ability to have faith but in being exposed to other people’s own challenges with having true, unconditional, open-minded faith. Merriam Webster defines faith as:

(1): belief and trust in and loyalty to God (2): belief in the traditional doctrines of a religion b (1): firm belief in something for which there is no proof (2): complete trust

Although Merriam Webster is far from Gospel (in the very literal sense, that is), I do believe they have a point here: firm belief in something for which there is no proof. No proof. If you have actual, solid “earthly” proof and that is what you need to have Faith, then you really are not having any Faith at all. In fact, the very idea that some of us will claim Faith in something and then seek out proof of that thing already cancels out the claim that there is Faith in that thing. When someone seeks out an answer – a definite right-before-your-eyes answer – you are not practicing Faith. You are practicing your own earthly ability to try and control Faith.

Ideally, we as humans – we as Christians – should be able to ask God for answers, ask God for help, ask God to show you the way, then move on. Move on and continue living your life in the pursuit of being closer to God. That pursuit is a path and if you truly believe in God, you have no reason to get off of the path and revisit that prayer just to make sure God has answered it. Granted, you should continue praying and continue asking God for help but the quest for control should stop at that point. When you ask God for something, God WILL give you an answer and the last thing God needs is for you to micromanage his work and to make sure that he follows through on it. I think that is the greatest roadblock for us as Christians when it comes to our Faith. We tell ourselves we have Faith, we testify to others we have Faith, we declare to God we have Faith, but then we feel the need to remind God that we have given ourselves to him and, well, just in case he got busy and didn’t catch it the first time, we want to check back in and see what God is doing and if he has had the chance to get to your request. Is that the kind of Faith God really wants from us?

My current career revolves around everyone and their dog asking me or my team to complete tasks for them. All requests for projects come to me and I manage whether or not a project request is really what the requester needs and if it meets that requirement, I schedule it to be completed. If a project is deemed as unreasonable or not at all the solution to the challenge, I offer an alternative – sometimes more than one alternative – and once the requestor understands how the alternative is actually a better solution to their challenge, I see that it is completed. There are two types of requestors that I have to deal with on a daily basis: 1)Those who know what I can do and what my team does and simply request the projects and get on with their own businesses, knowing that by the date promised (often times sooner), that project will get completed without them ever having to check in on my team or stop by my desk every hour to check on the progress. 2) Then there are those who ask for a request, send emails all day long to me seeing where my team is on the request, calling my desk to make sure my team hasn’t forgotten about the request, pulling me out of meetings to make sure I have everything I need to complete the request, coming by my desk to make changes to the request, and sometimes, in the end, realizing the request was not what they needed after all and cancelling the request after dragging the timeline well past the original completion date and exhausting everyone else’s time, while asking for a new request to make up for their unsatisfied state with the previous request. Which one of those types do you think has gotten more 100% satisfaction from my team?

There was a time where I would ask God, after having prayed for something multiple times, why he hasn’t answered my prayer or what am I doing wrong that may be preventing the answer from coming to me. Those were not productive times for me. I made a lot of mistakes. I caused others to stumble from my own misinterpretation of what I thought was the truth. I did not have Faith. Although I am still no where near where I need to be, I have grown a lot since that time. I have realized that those times when I would challenge God and call him out to be accountable for where he did not help me, that all along, as I wasted his time with my inability to see the truth, that he did answer my prayers and he did give me what I needed. But just in a way that I was not expecting. And that was the problem, I made a request to God and I made an expectation of God and in doing so, if God did not answer my prayer the way I wanted it answered, then I assumed that he did not listen and was being unreasonable. How foolish I was. Granted, I know I am still only a foolish human being now but one that has a better idea of what Faith is and of what God expects from me, not vice versa.

Control. The ironic thing about “control” is that if you put control in the hands of a child, your car will steer off the road and possibly kill you and everyone else in the car. You cannot allow an immature being to be in total control of any complex machine because that being will not know what to do if that machine goes awry and not function the way the being expects it to. Life is the most complex machine we as humans will ever know in our mortal state. You may be able to train yourself to better drive that car straighter on the highway or better guide that paint brush more smoothly onto the canvas but not a single one of us will ever be able to fully control Life. Even with the ability to steer a car perfectly between the broken white lines on the highway, all it takes is another car with less control to cause the both of you to go careening over the edge of the cliff into a fiery explosion of pure chaos. You can control aspects of your life but do you really have total control of it? And if not, how can you even pretend to think you can control others’? And do you really want to? How many “others” would you have to control in order to make sure that this Life goes the way you think it is supposed to? And what happens if someone else’s idea of “supposed to” contradicts yours? The only real control that we can perfect that will guarantee perfect results every time is Faith. If we can completely, entirely put our Faith in God and at that point, let go of “control”, things will be running a lot smoother than they have ever run in the past.

Human beings from day one have always had the wonderful ability to be unpredictable. The awesome power of freewill has always been a blessing but because we are humans and we are not God, that very blessing has given us the ability to make it into a curse. When God created Man, he created a beautiful thing. Far more beautiful than any other creature or object that he had ever created. Here is a being that not only eats and sleeps like any other animal, and loves and pleases like other animals…this being can choose not to do any of those things. God could have made us where we would merely exist and go through our routines like fish do or dogs or deer but he had already done that. He already made cats, he already made trees. Would it really have been that spectacular for God, after creating hermit crabs and dolphins and rabbits and moray eels to have created Man if he merely existed on this Earth as a reactive creature? Well, yes, because God would have created it and it would have been good. But God, the almighty Creator, is a creative person. After creating the duck-billed platypus, it was time to create something even more awesome. And the one element that made Man so much more awesome than a mammal that lays eggs was to create a creature that could think for itself and have the freewill to decide not to do the things God created him to do. Man was a perfect creation. Man was not perfect.

And being not perfect, any idea that Man creates can be flawed. This does not mean that we cannot come up with great ideas. We have. It was through the use of Man’s mind that we were able to utilize electricity to power whole nations. It was through Man’s use of his fleshly brain that we are able to fly from one country to another. It was through Man’s ingenuity that we can pinpoint the exact point when a single strand of DNA can determine what color our eyes will be. But it was this same Man that was able to use the same mind that created all of these wonderful advances in science that we were able to create an atom bomb and make the decision to drop it on Hiroshima. With this knowledge, does this not seem logical that any idea that Man comes up with can be questioned? Asking this question, does it not dispel any reason to have faith in Man and put us in a depressing state of how can I trust anyone? Not really. It is true. Man and Man alone cannot be trusted. You cannot have faith in Man because Man is flawed and Man at his own devices will fail you every time. So, yes, one cannot trust Man. But one can trust God. One can definitely have Faith in God. So when we question ourselves or others in our lives, we do not need to ask ourselves, “Can I trust him to do right?” or “Can I have faith in her to be true?” but ask, “Is God in his life” and, “Is she listening to God?” because although we cannot have faith in Man alone, we can have Faith in Man with God.

My wife recently told me about how her science professor made it quite clear in class that God had no place in science. I respect that. I recently heard the phrase, “Where science ends, God begins.” This makes sense. Science has never been (shall I go as far as to say) an exact science. But God has always been an exact God. You cannot switch the phrases around: Where God ends, science begins. This cannot be true because God does not end but science does. Where would we be today if we merely accepted the “science” that the earth was flat? Or if we accepted the “science” that removing “bad blood” from the sick can heal them? Yes, compared to today’s standards, those claims seem ridiculous but isn’t just as likely that the “science” that we believe in today can be just as ridiculous 100 years from now? Heck, it is most likely some of the reports we read in highly recognized science journals today will be completely ludicrous a week from now. Science is also a creation of Man and because Man is flawed, so is science. Having said that, how can I have faith in science? I cannot. But I can have Faith in God because you cannot disprove God.

These days I have been more at peace with myself. More than I have been in a long time. And I understand why. For years I have been trying to be in complete control of my life and in complete control of the world around me but I realize now that I am Man and Man is not perfect. It takes a perfect person to be able to control this world and the only one that fits that bill is God. I am not God. I am no where near being God. And because of that, I cannot, at my own devices, make myself right. I cannot, in my own control, help make others right. I am in no place, on my own, to justify my actions or judge others’. But I can, with the help of God – a lot of help, desire to be perfect. And because I know that I am Man and that Man cannot be perfect, the only way I can get as close as I possibly can be to being what cannot be physically accomplished on this earth is to have Faith.